Sean Connery’s third turn as James Bond is the one where the series came into focus. Goldfinger, directed by Guy Hamilton, arrived in 1964 as the third instalment from Eon Productions, and it is the film that took the character from a spy in a suit to a global franchise with a formula. It runs 110 minutes. It is an adventure, an action picture and a thriller at once.
Trailer, via James Bond 007.
The Plot Against Fort Knox
The story is simple and enormous. Bond investigates Auric Goldfinger, a gold magnate who plans to irradiate the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox with a dirty bomb. The scheme would wreck the American gold reserve and, as the synopsis puts it, obliterate the world’s economy.
Gert Fröbe plays Goldfinger as a wealthy, psychopathic man obsessed with gold. The film opens in Miami Beach, where Bond is relaxing after a mission. M, through CIA agent Felix Leiter, sends him to watch the bullion dealer, who is staying at the same hotel.
Bond catches Goldfinger cheating at a high-stakes gin rummy game with the help of his employee Jill Masterson, played by Shirley Eaton. Bond interrupts, blackmails Goldfinger into losing, and spends an evening with Jill. Then Goldfinger’s Korean manservant, Oddjob, knocks Bond out. He wakes to find Jill dead, covered in gold paint, killed by skin suffocation.
A Bar of Nazi Gold in Kent
Back in London, M gives Bond the job of finding out how Goldfinger moves gold across borders. Q supplies a modified Aston Martin DB5 and two tracking devices. Bond plays golf with Goldfinger at his country club in Kent, using a bar of recovered Nazi gold from the Bank of England to distract him.
Goldfinger tries to cheat. Bond tricks him into losing the match anyway. Goldfinger warns him off, and Oddjob shows his strength and his steel-brimmed hat.
Bond plants a tracker in Goldfinger’s car and follows him to Switzerland. There he meets Tilly, who tries to kill Goldfinger and is accidentally stopped by Bond. Bond breaks into Goldfinger’s refinery and overhears him tell the Chinese nuclear physicist Ling that he hides gold in the bodywork of his Rolls-Royce Phantom III to smuggle it out of England.
He also hears the phrase “Operation Grand Slam.” Tilly reveals she is Jill’s sister and wants revenge. An alarm trips. Oddjob kills Tilly with his hat, and Bond is captured, strapped to a table and threatened with an overhead industrial laser. Bond lies to Goldfinger that MI6 already knows about Operation Grand Slam.
Honor Blackman and the Flying Circus
Honor Blackman plays Pussy Galore, Goldfinger’s personal pilot and the leader of an all-female team of pilots called Pussy Galore’s Flying Circus. Blackman got the part because of her role as the judoka Cathy Gale in The Avengers, where she had trained in martial arts. The script was rewritten to make Pussy Galore a judoka too.
The name follows the tradition of Bond girls’ names built on double entendres. The producers worried about American censors and considered “Kitty Galore.” They kept the original. During promotion, Blackman took delight in embarrassing interviewers by saying the name over and over.
The American censors did not touch the name in the film. They did refuse to let it appear on promotional materials. For the American market she was billed as “Miss Galore” or “Goldfinger’s personal pilot.”
What the Film Added to Bond
Goldfinger is remembered as the film where James Bond comes into focus. Several elements that became standard in later Bond films started here.
- Gadgets used heavily by Bond, including the modified Aston Martin DB5 and its tracking devices.
- A pre-credits sequence that stands largely apart from the main plot.
- Multiple foreign locales, moving from Miami Beach to London to Kent to Switzerland.
- Tongue-in-cheek humour running alongside the violence.
The franchise’s commercial scale changed with it. Goldfinger was the first Bond film to take over $100 million. Its budget was equal to the two preceding films combined. Principal photography ran from January to July 1964 in the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the United States.
Corgi Cars and a Life Cover
The marketing reached further than the box office. A toy Aston Martin DB5 from Corgi Toys became the biggest-selling toy of 1964. An image of the gold-painted Eaton ran on the cover of Life.
The film also won an Academy Award for Best Sound Editing, the first Bond film to win an Oscar. That is a strange fact to sit with. The series is not remembered for its sound work. It is remembered for the look of a dead woman painted gold, a man with a steel hat, and a laser creeping toward a man’s legs.
Bond and Goldfinger, Side by Side
Set the two leads against each other and the film’s engine becomes clear. Bond and Goldfinger are built on the same obsession, just pointed in different directions.
| James Bond | Auric Goldfinger | |
|---|---|---|
| Actor | Sean Connery | Gert Fröbe |
| Role | MI6 agent, 007 | Wealthy gold magnate |
| Obsession | The mission | Gold itself |
| Signature method | Gadgets, lying, the Aston Martin DB5 | Cheating at cards, smuggling gold in a Rolls-Royce Phantom III |
| Help on hand | Q’s equipment | Oddjob, with the steel-brimmed hat |
| Plan | Stop Operation Grand Slam | Irradiate Fort Knox with a dirty bomb |
The table shows why Goldfinger works as a villain. He is not a shadowy organisation. He is a rich man with a hobby, and the hobby is the world’s gold supply.
The Cast Around Connery
The supporting cast is doing real work. Harold Sakata plays Oddjob, whose hat kills Tilly and whose strength is demonstrated before it is used. Bernard Lee returns as M. Cec Linder plays Felix Leiter. Lois Maxwell is Miss Moneypenny. Martin Benson plays Martin Solo, Austin Willis plays Simmons, and Bill Nagy plays Midnight. Tania Mallet plays Tilly Masterson.
Connery’s salary rose for the film, but a pay dispute emerged during shooting. Connery hurt his back filming the scene where Oddjob knocks Bond unconscious in Miami. After the injury, the dispute settled: Eon agreed to pay Connery 5% of the gross of each Bond film he starred in.
That deal is the quiet story under the film. The star of a franchise that was about to take over $100 million a picture had just tied his pay to the gross. Goldfinger made Bond a brand, and it also made Connery a partner in it.
Why the Formula Still Holds
Goldfinger earns its reputation. The plot is absurd on paper — a dirty bomb in Kentucky, a private air force of women pilots, a manservant who kills with his hat — and the film never apologises for any of it. It plays the absurdity straight, which is the only way it could work.
The elements that later became tiresome are fresh here. The gadgets are few and specific: a car, two trackers. The pre-credits sequence is a standalone piece rather than a trailer for the rest. The humour is dry rather than winking. Later films would copy the surface and lose the restraint.
Guy Hamilton directs it as the first of four Bond films he would make. The pacing holds across 110 minutes. The refinery sequence, the golf match, the laser table and the Fort Knox scheme each land as their own set piece without the film sagging between them.
The weakness is the same one the series never fixed: the women exist to be used, avenged or renamed for censors. Jill dies to motivate Bond. Tilly dies to motivate Bond. Pussy Galore’s name was a fight the producers won for no better reason than a joke. The film knows this and does not care, and neither, mostly, does the audience.
What matters is that Goldfinger is the film where the machine started running. The Corgi car, the Life cover, the Oscar for sound editing, the $100 million gross — all of it follows from a movie that figured out what a Bond film was. Connery is the reason it holds. Fröbe is the reason it threatens. Blackman is the reason it is remembered.
Rotten Tomatoes scores it 9.9/10, an aggregate of 99%.
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